Agile amphibians

THE first amphibians to crawl from water onto land may have been surprisingly sprightly, soaking up enough energy from the sun to dash around and catch prey, much as crocodiles do today.

Amphibians evolved from lobe-finned fish about 370 million years ago. The prevailing wisdom has been that they were initially sluggish. Cold-blooded, they would have had to bask in the sun to stay active. And their limbs were more like flippers than feet, suggesting they shuffled their metre-long bodies awkwardly on land.

But Robert Carroll of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, says his studies of fossil skeletons suggest the …

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